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Sunday 7 September 2008

Defying definition

Laura Gascoigne on Divisionism

As it happened, our arrival in Milan coincided with the anniversary of the Bava-Beccaris massacre. We passed the sites of 1898 barricades, but although Berlusconi’s new government was sworn in the day we arrived, we witnessed no angry raids on panifici. Milan’s old trams may look identical to the one used as a barricade in Longoni’s ‘Orator of the Strike’, but life in the big city has moved on. It’s in the rural villages of Volpedo and Colma, where time seems to stand still, that you get a sense of where the Divisionists were literally coming from. In the freshly renovated gallery of the Cassa di Risparmio di Tortona there’s a good collection of Pellizza paintings — beautifully hung and lit — while Casale Monferrato’s museum in a 15th-century monastery houses Morbelli’s art collection, plus an entire studio’s worth of original plasters by Bistolfi (including several for monuments in the Cimitero).

But it’s in Pellizza’s and Morbelli’s rural studios — the former open to the public, the latter not — that you bump up against the basic contradictions in a modern-art movement rooted in an agrarian economy. No wonder Divisionism is so confusing. It was left to the Divisionists’ urban heirs, the Futurists, to propel Italian art into the modern era. ‘The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp,’ their 1910 manifesto brutally declared. In fact, what did for Divisionism was electricity. With Balla’s 1910 study of one of Rome’s first electric streetlights, the beauties of nature and social issues are thrown into shadow.

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